The Ahuizotl That Loved Me
by casadekyle
Summary: Two Southern Californian teenagers chase a newly hatched Aztec creature through downtown Laguna Beach. Will they pacify its bloodlust? Or will it kill a LOT of people? Welcome to the world of the gods.
1. An Uncertain Disclaimer

I'm not entirely sure how to start one of these things.

I guess I'll go with a standard All-Of-This-Is-True, What-You-Think-I-Made-It-Up? statement, because - after all - no matter how fictional all of this stuff seems, it's real. For legit. Not trying to be a fiction writer here. This is a seriously dangerous story that might get you killed.

Ha, just kidding. It won't get you killed.

It might challenge your view on reality, the universe, and the stars. It might shock you and force you to reevaluate everything. You might want to complain, demand that one thing be one way or another because what you believe about this or that, or you might just scoff and go, "Wow, Blake. Great fairytale. You're trying to convince people it's real? Ha, good luck." If you're planning on doing that, _puh-leeze_. I've fought monsters and gods. I think I can face down some hate letters.

Whatever your lamentation is, it will not affect me or the truth in any way, only make it stronger. Like the hydra Percy Jackson fought in Sea of Monsters? It won't go away. You're fighting a futile battle, and the only solution is to find me and personally blow me into slimy bits with a celestial bronze cannon. But it won't get you killed. Unless you come after me with a bronze cannon, in which case I'd have to kill you for self-defense... and unless you're like me. But that's a different topic altogether.

To those of you who are hearing me out… thanks. Really. It means a lot.

If you're here, you're probably a fan of the Percy Jackson series, and I'm assuming you recognized the bit of random knowledge about Sea of Monsters I just threw at you. All history aside, I too am a fan. Rick Riordan's stories are awesome. (Am I a fan of Rick himself? Well… the situation's complicated.) But they didn't become a major figment of my life, like a fact of my existence, until this all happened to me.

So, news flash! Ol' Rick was telling the truth. I, Blake Lampros, am a living representation of that.

Except there was one vital element he left out - this strange celestial force that the Greeks and the Egyptians and… I guess, the Norse? (sorry, I'm not super attuned to the new series)… call the "Mist," that birthed the forces we know as gods (not capital "G" Gods, but lowercase)… well, it made more than just a few. You've probably already guessed that.

Suffice to say, few hundred years ago a native civilization formed in modern-day Mexico. They decided to create the most bizarre and frightening myths this side of the hemisphere, all with one goal in mind: to make Blake Lampros's life as difficult as possible. They believed in these monsters and vengeful gods so powerfully that they even murdered their own to satisfy them, granting this celestiality, this idea, so much power that the Mist eventually decided to make them real. Flesh and bones. Then suddenly all these peoples' beliefs were validated before their eyes. (Thanks a lot, Mist.)

They were called the Aztecs. And they were a pretty effed-up people.

I'll leave it at that. I don't know how many other ancient religions have achieved consciousness, and frankly, it scares me. The Aztecs are crazy and hardcore enough. Seriously - they worshiped some _scary_ stuff, and I've had to come face-to-face with some of the scariest. Who knows what _other_ ancient civilizations might have to offer?

This story is being told is on a fanfiction website because it's unpublishable. I would call up Rick and ask him if I could write a book about it… but… I've kinda burnt that bridge. He won't speak to me after the incident in Tacoma, and it's unlikely he wants an account of this kind floating around. So we'll just keep this low-key. Right? Right.

So I suppose... this is a disclaimer of sorts (I can hear Paul now: "What, a thousand word disclaimer?") that this is not fanfiction. This a way to tell my story without being hunted down by Disney Hyperion. This is a very real account reminiscent of another very real fictional account.

This is fan-NONfiction, and it's a story that needs to be told.

One afternoon I was biking down Pacific Coast Highway with my buddy Paul. And we, inadvertently, entered a whole world of craziness that shook my poor butt out of its quiet bibliophilic hole.

Told by a kid who, by definition, is nothing like the heroes of old, and has a friend who _would_ be, if he wasn't completely psycho.

Yeah. I'm liking this already.


	2. And the Rabbit Went Squelch

It takes a special kind of guy to rope his bud into a six-hour bike ride with no food or map and limited water in 90-degree heat.

A "certifiably insane" guy.

That would be Paul. And we'd been riding the trails at El Moro, a long canyon that sits between the famous Crystal Cove of Southern California and a gigantic toll road, for hours. Now it was time to go home - on one of the coast's most crowded highways.

Certifiably fun times with a certifiably insane idiot.

At El Moro that day Paul looked the way he always did, albeit more sweaty. His long sandy bangs almost reaching to his eyes, but not quite, were smooshed down by his helmet and twitched like a lifeless creature whenever a sea breeze passed by. A pair of pink polarized sunglasses hid most of his face from both sun and proper identification (just in case, you know, he decided to shoplift from a liquor store on the ride home), and even though on anyone else pink lenses would look dorky, he downright rocked them. Paul rocked anything.

He ran through girlfriends like pairs of underwear. One of the math teachers at school legitimately thought his name was "John." And he used words like "bro" and "my man" and "wassup" ad nauseum. Paul was an OC rapscallion, pure and simple - like some dude you would find at the local skate park hanging ten and doing dolphin twists.

Next to him, I didn't exactly look like Joe Cool. I had short, spiked-up brown hair that was almost dark enough to pass as black and never seemed to look the way I wanted it to. My cheeks were chubby and pimply. My face was kind of roundish, as opposed to Paul's stocky, cut-by-God structure that the girls went wild for. At a glance, I looked like the kind of guy who didn't touch beaches with a ten-foot pole and stayed inside playing League of Legends all day.

And I was. Sort of. More of an "Undertale" guy, but anyway…

It's odd, though. Despite being a complete homebody, I loved spending time with Paul more than I did with anyone else. He got me doing the stuff that people always associate with teenage years: the crazy things, like "borrowing" some guy's surfboard at the beach and using it for fifteen minutes before he noticed, and five minutes after that; buying a cheap plastic sled from Walmart and trying to slip down the grassy slopes of Salt Creek, knocking down an umbrella and someone's grandmother in the process; pretending to stalk popular girls with oversized sunglasses and cheap hoodies concealing our identities. And I'm grateful for all that. But as he took me on his crazy adventures, I spared him broken bones, endless scrapes and gouges, once even from a getting bitten by a squirrel with rabies - that was how the balance worked. Yin and Yang. Cheech and Chong. Some other trope. You know what I mean.

Oftentimes our friendship underwent rough patches - literally. There was the time he dragged me through an off-trail adventure that ended with us stranded on an unknown ridge in the middle of the night, with two dead cell phones and no water. We fought and eventually attracted a ranger who almost fined us. And, to be perfectly honest, El Moro seemed to me like one of those times where I wouldn't speak to Paul for days afterwards - just the sort of rigorously unplanned, misguided endeavor Paul took such miscare to plan that made us argue and briefly forget why we were friends.

But then it happened.

The air outside was as hot the inside of a furnace. For all of you cold climate readers, you're gonna be picturing this bundled up in your fashionable puffy jackets and fleece blankets: it's gonna seem far away for you, and I'm jealous of that. But it's the very opposite for us. We had to actually trundle around with the heat (that might as well be a fleece blanket) affecting us like a sedative, making our limbs weigh twenty pounds each, and DO stuff. It sucks. Especially when you have to pedal up one of SoCal's busiest highways in a two-foot wide bike lane where the asphalt is melting beneath your tires. Entirely Paul's idea, as I'm sure you've guessed.

Don't get me wrong, PCH is a nice drive in a car. It's got peaceful surroundings, going through cheery old Laguna Beach, filled with friendly-looking shops and gullible tourists. But to me it was known as Bike Hell.

Crystal Cove was en route to our destination and had never looked more enticing. Crystal Cove is a pretty renowned beach in California, maybe not as renowned as Long Beach or something, but a lot better. It curved through in its assured splendor underneath massive dirt-and-sand peaks and tall, burnt green grasses. The place was a SoCal touchstone.

Here's the point. Climbing that hill was hard work. I'd just burnt myself, like, six times on my water bottle holder, and if the heat was a drug, I'd overdosed. I just needed to be out there in the water… even with the toddlers running around in their overloaded diapers, women snapping at anything that moved and reading thick novels, a few Mexican kids about my age wading through the crowds and trying to play frisbee. I could break free! About forty feet out into the water in became as barren as a desert (if a bunch of seawater can at all be compared to a desert) and boy, I was there. Screw the weaklings who weren't brave enough to go past knee-deep waters and wailed whenever someone mentioned the word "stingray."

At that moment, I ran over a dead rabbit. It made a big squelch and something that might've been a brain oozed out of its tiny bronze skull. And realized, sweat pouring down my face and onto my Ramones t-shirt, that my fantasy would probably never happen.

Cars whizzed past by the dozens. Canyons and seagulls soared overhead. Luxury houses sat on every beach viewpoint like overweight gargoyles, looking out at the horizon with their streamlined, fat-man glory. And roadkill was everywhere.

The moral of the story is never do anything in the heat. Things will go south so fast it'll make your head spin. And things seem to happen in the ninety-degree weather that don't when it's cold. Odd things. Supernatural things. Stuff like… oh, I don't know, dead animals clogging up the streets… fat dudes in G-strings clogging up the beaches… and the strange and mysterious appearances of gold treasure chests on the side of your local throbbing highway.

And guess who immediately saw the chest? And decided to go running towards it?

Well, it ain't the fat G-string guys. And it wasn't me either.


	3. The Egg Hatches

I don't know if it's Paul's hyperactivity or just his weirdness, but he often sees things off the trail that any normal person would miss. He'd found fifteen bucks and a dead quail that way before. This time he found something a LOT more major.

We had just finished pedaling past a Ruby's Shake Shack. Crystal Cove was behind us now and we were moving onto a section of the road that was enclosed with eucalyptus trees, which were probably suffering more than we were - most of them looked dead as doornails. Then without warning my friend threw down his bike and scurried off into the bushes. His checkered Vans sent up little clouds of dust.

"Paul!" I panted. "What on Earth are you _doing_?"

"Hold on!" he yelled back. "I see something. Be back in a second."

"What could… possibly be so important… for you to drop your bike in the middle of the _street_?!" But I sat back and waited. Much to my annoyance, Paul didn't return, but instead called me over.

"What is it? Just tell me from here!" I shouted to him.

"No, you have to see this!" came Paul's voice from over the hill. "Come on, hurry!"

I swore under my breath, dropped the bike, and walked over to where Paul was perched, staring at something far down the gorge. There was something odd about the way he looked - but it could've been nothing but a gorgeous girl in a swimsuit who Paul thought be might have a chance with.

I was about to say something - I think it was another curse word - when Paul pointed. "What do you think that is?"

He was pointing down the hill at a small granite rock, flecked with black spots and surrounded by nettle bushes. Resplendent on top of it was a dead seagull.

"I think that's a dead seagull."

"No, next to the seagull."

Then I saw it. A small golden chest, only about a square foot in size, half-buried in the dust, was the object of Paul's attention. The way the bushes were planted around it made it seem like a natural part of the landscape.

Now I was interested. (Big mistake.) I knelt down next to Paul. "What do you think it is?"

"Dunno. Let's check it out."

We ran back to our bikes and pulled them into the shade of a poor, overworked eucalyptus. Then we slid down the hill and knelt next to the box and the granite sentry.

Paul grabbed a stick and flicked the seagull a couple feet away. How the bird made it there all the way from the road, I'll never know.

Paul put his hands on it and gave me a big grin. "Must be a treasure chest."

"What gave it away, the gold or the fact that it's box-shaped?"

"It looks like there's little drawings on it. Like little stick figures and stuff."

"What? Give it here." Paul was right. There was a detailed engraving of several hunters fighting a demonic animal with claws and spikes; entirely colorless, paint having long been scraped off by the wind and sand. Surrounding it were teensy little symbols drawn into strings that looked like Egyptian hieroglyphics.

"There's writing on it, too!" I exclaimed.

"Yeah, I know. What should we do with it? Should we open it?" Paul was rubbing his hands together anxiously, like a toddler in front of a chocolate cake. His RVCA t-shirt was covered in swaths of dust from bending down, and I admired the fact that he didn't know or care.

I examined the box apprehensively. "I don't know… Bro, this could be like a legit artifact. We should call an archaeologist or somebody. It should be in a museum."

"Blake, it's on the side of Pacific Coast Highway, blatantly exposed to everyone driving past. If it's that important, shouldn't someone have seen it by now?"

He had a point. Still, I was cautious. "But it's just common sense! I mean, a box lying out of nowhere on the side of the road. It might have drugs in it or something."

Paul sighed like he was talking to a kindergartener. "This ain't CSI, dude."

"How would we open it, anyway?" I said defensively. "It's bolted shut."

Paul whipped out a Swiss Army knife from his pocket. "There ain't nothin' that a pocketknife can't fix."

"Actually, there are a lot of things a pocketknife can't fix."

"Just gimme the box." Paul snatched it out of my hands and examined it. "Dang, this thing is rusted pretty heavy." He scratched a layer of tarnish off with a fingernail, inspected it for a moment, then tossed it away. "Now, if my nerd sensibilities are correct-"

"Nerd sensibilities?"

"-pure gold doesn't tarnish. It doesn't react to oxygen like, say, bronze or copper… So this gold must be mixed with something else. Pretty modern concept. But I don't know…" Flicking out the knife, he wedged the blade inside the thin crevice separating top and bottom.

As he struggled to open pull it open, I asked, "So, where do you think the box came from? Mayans? Egyptians? Aztecs?"

Paul gave me a look. To be honest, I didn't know if I was being sarcastic or not; the situation was so baffling, I wasn't sure how to react.

Paul decided to take it literally. "Dunno," he said. "This is hard."

"Want me to give it a try?"

"No. This is easy. There, got it."

There was an audible KA-CHUNK as the door swung open. Inside lay a giant milky-white sphere, like the egg of a Godzilla chicken. Little flecks of blue and gray covered it, little marks that could've been made by a preschooler's crayon: random and unrefined, yet complementary to the stone's appearance. It was beautiful and elegant, yet rustic, flawed. A ray of sunlight caught the stone's unnatural shine and sent its colors dancing.

There was no padding or anything to protect it. From one look I guessed it was as hard as diamond.

Paul was the first to speak. "Wow," he said. He reached out to touch it.

I tried to stop him. "Wait, Paul, I don't think-"

As soon as his index finger hit the stone's surface, I heard a faint hiss. Paul flew backwards, howling and clutching his finger. The box fell from his hands and hit the ground.

The stone popped into the air like it was weightless. For a moment all light seem to drawn to it, leaving all else in a sudden darkness. The colorful flecks seemed to illuminate from some fire within the stone's core. I felt an eerie thrill.

Then, as if a spell had broken, it landed with a _thud_ in the dirt. It steamed faintly and seemed undamaged from its fall.

The stream of profanity from Paul's mouth thrust me back into reality.

"Son of a WAFFLE!" he yelled. "Holy… kidney stones, that was HOT!"

I didn't answer. I simply stared at the stone.

It was then I realized that something wasn't right with our discovery. I knew it as surely as the sky was blue.

This bizarre magic we had stumbled upon was… unnatural. It wasn't meant to be. Something about it, something so profoundly wrong had shaken me to my soul, caused my insides to crumble like rotting matter. I didn't properly know what "it" was yet. But whatever was inside that stone, it was chaos waiting to be unleashed - and we were the unfortunate idiots about to set it free.

Paul moved to a more comfortable sitting position, sucking on his burnt finger. "Ow. Ow. Ow. OW!" he said. He stood up, brushed himself off, then noticed how strange I looked. "What?"

"This," I said shakily, "this thing is bad."

Yeah, I was real articulate.

Paul frowned. "Well, of course it's BAD. I just got a second-degree burn from the thing."

"No," I murmured. "It's more than that. This is… alien. It's not meant to be."

"Ooookay," Paul said. "Now you're starting to freak me out."

The stone started to tremble. It bounced around in the dust, and a thin crack appeared near the top. A high-pitched squeal, like an electric saw, pierced the air.

"And that doesn't?" I said.

The moment I spoke those words, something scorched my backside. No, less of a scorch, more of a pinch.

"ACK!" I cried.

The squeal stopped.

"What? What is it?" Paul said. "You okay, dude?"

I couldn't answer. Pieces of shell started to fall off of the stone, revealing a slimy interior dripping with mucus. The longish snout of some doglike creature emerged from the hole and breathed in, once, twice, then growled low and deep. Paul jumped back. "Holy cow! Holy cow! It's an egg! Let's get out of here!"

I didn't move. Something was keeping me close. Even though I itched to get away, I simply couldn't - my limbs wouldn't work in my favor. Even today, knowing all the trouble that (literally) godforsaken egg has caused me, the feeling was irrefutably.

Whatever was controlling me bent my knees smoothly, bringing me into a defensive stance, and I felt something odd in my back pocket where the pinch had come from. Something was in that pocket. Something that I hadn't felt before.

"Come on!" Paul was really scared now. "Blake! Come on! We gotta get outta here!"

My hand flew out and clamped onto Paul's forearm. He cried out and started yanking on me frantically, trying to get away. Again, not my intention. I felt like I was a puppet, doing a little dance for some foreboding master up in the sky. And whatever or whoever the master was, the message was clear - we weren't leaving.

A small black creature crawled out of the egg as gracefully as a cat, licking the goo off its spiny flank.

Paul immediately stopped pulling on me and stared at the beast in horror. "We're dead," he whispered. "We are so completely dead."


End file.
